Dynamic environments, and in particular emergency or catastrophic environments, subject those present to extreme and hostile conditions in which to accomplish specific missions or task requiring the location and the assessment of the status of objects of interest. One example of a representative mission requiring real time, dynamic relative positioning is that of an emergency medical technician or other emergency care provider. An alternative, but no less equally important mission, includes the need for members of a relief team responding to a natural disaster (e.g., a hurricane or earthquake) to maintain situation awareness of the environment at all times and in all conditions (e.g., poor visibility), and in particular to locate, treat, and monitor casualties and where appropriate to locate, track and monitor other team member activities.
To achieve mission success during catastrophes or other extremely high workload conditions, a emergency medical technician or other emergency care provider must receive large amounts of casualty medical information, and is required to maintain situation awareness of the battlefield environment at all times and in all conditions. All prior solutions have used two dimensional visual displays (for example, Personal Digital Assistants or laptops) to display the casualty medical information. These current visual displays demand the operator's visual attention that can compromise mission effectiveness, and operations in low light visibility environments can cause fatigue, degrade performance, and compromise clandestine operations. The operator could be much more effective and efficient if his eyes were used to survey his surroundings rather than continuously monitoring a visual display.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a device that enhances the ability of the emergency medical technician or other operator to locate, assess, track and monitor objects of interest (including but not limited to casualties) in a dynamic environment.